Apparently someone in SQU (the Swarthmore Queer Union) thinks I’m stupid. This, in and of itself, isn’t surprising, considering I dedicated my last post to a moderately facetious rant about why I think SQU is pretty stupid, too. (And, by the way, to the author of that comment: of course my parents don’t read my e-mail over my shoulder. They log into my MobileMe account directly and read it there. C’mon; give Mr and Mrs Roth some credit.)

But in the grand scheme of my pontifications about various organizations at Swarthmore, joking about kinky queer sex is probably unproductive, so here’s the bigger point of my last post:

Swarthmore goes to great lengths to advertise itself as a queer-friendly institution. One of the things that queer freshmen like talking about most, it seems, is the “Welcome Queer Specs” (that is to say, prospective students) banner that hangs from the Tarble bell tower during the annual open house weekend. It is assumed, therefore, that because we talk a lot about being queer, we’re obviously a queer-safe campus. This is not the case, and SQU is to blame for a number of reasons.

Coming Out Week. Every year, campus is overrun at some point during the fall semester with a series of extremely vulgar chalkings, as part of the Coming Out Week bacchanalia that, in some perverse way, is supposed to make people feel better about being proudly queer. The problem is, unless you’re already out and comfortable with your sexuality, Coming Out Week has the well-known effect of scaring the living shit out of you. My freshman year, for instance, I went chalking and, along with a straight female friend, wrote a list of every pet name for female genitilia that we could come up with. There was nothing constructive about this; it was publicly and unnecessarily vulgar. And while I’m the one blogging about it, I’m certainly not the only one to chalk something sexually explicit and decidedly un-queer-safe. (See also: the drawings of anal sex that make an appearance every year on McGill Walk.)

The point is, there is such pressure to come out in a particular, extravagant way, or to conform to some hysterical image of gay pride that more often than not, Coming Out Week is the worst possible time to actually come out. And, perhaps because of the lingering bad taste of Coming Out Week, or any of the various other aggressively queer events organized in large part by SQU, there are more than a few students who simply decline to come out altogether. This isn’t because they’re cowardly closet cases; it’s because Swarthmore’s queer community has made Swarthmore into a queer-unsafe space.

Sexual assault. Last week, I learned the word “swooping.” Apparently, it’s the upperclassman practice of taking advantage of the categorical ignorance of incoming freshmen re: queer relationships and queer sex. Freshmen, having endured the indignities of Coming Out Week, are thrust into a position where the little security they’ve managed to find for themselves and their identity is challenged by horny upperclassmen looking for an easy fuck. A friend relayed to me a story about a queer freshman who, having just come out, had sex with an upperclassman. The sex turned out to be violent and, when the freshman in question was bleeding for days afterwards and asked the upperclassman who was only too willing to take his virginity for advice, he got the answer: “That’s just how queer sex is.”

No, actually, that’s not how queer sex is. Let’s start with that.

My freshman year at Swarthmore, I ill-advisedly got trashed on my 19th birthday. It was a Thursday. After I was already drunk, a then-senior started hitting on me and handing me more drinks. Anyone with eyes could have seen that I was far beyond the point of giving informed consent. But I was lonely, and probably more than a little horny, so I went back to his room. Fortunately, my foolish decisions had a limit, probably because I fell asleep; but waking up the next morning in his bed, still drunk, I had to wonder: why did no one stick up for me? I take responsibility for my actions, including my drinking, but there is always another side to the story. It’s a side that’s uncomfortable to talk about, because it’s uncomfortable for anyone — and particularly for self-assured Swarthmore students — to admit. That night, I was taken advantage of because I was a stupid freshman and no one told me what to expect. And the two stories in this post aren’t unique.

When the issue of swooping was brought before the SQU Board, the group I referred to as “über-gays” who are responsible for organizing the group’s meetings and events on campus, it was summarily dismissed. Is swooping a uniquely queer issue? Absolutely not, and Swarthmore does a fairly good job with educating freshmen about sexual assault when they arrive. But it’s worth recognizing that freshmen who have just come out of the closet, or who are getting their first taste of queer life away from home and their parents, are in a particularly vulnerable position. And, I ask again: who’s sticking up for them? Ostensibly, it should be SQU. The only problem is, whether out of cowardice, or a head-in-the-sand reluctance to acknowledge that this is a real problem, or because the members of SQU Board are the ones doing the swooping, they don’t.

What it means to be queer. Identity politics at Swarthmore, ultimately, isn’t so much about what you are as it is about who you choose to affiliate with. A preponderance of various groups covering every inch of every possible spectrum — from the Swarthmore Womyn of Color Collective, which is pretty self-explanatory, to Small Group, a group dedicated to students in the process of coming out, to Enlace, a group primarily composed of Latin students, to Ikea, a group for Swedish enthusiasts of flat-packed furniture — is Swarthmore’s way to tell everyone, “There’s somewhere here that you should feel welcome.”

But Swarthmore has more students by a few orders of magnitude than it does organizations, and I think that SQU (and other campus groups) have forgotten that. The microscopic focus of many groups — in the case of SQU, it’s their core of we’re-here-we’re-queer rainbow-flag-toting chieftains — means that unless you happen to fit into one of a few dozen discrete and very hard-edged categories, you’re necessarily going to feel excluded. Certainly, no single group can or should comfortably include every queer student, or every woman, or every student of color; but the opposite shouldn’t be true, either. By focusing so particularly on one type of aggressively queer student (I don’t mean that in a sexual way; I just mean: very confidently out), SQU does a disservice to the rest of the queer population on campus.

Coming Out Week is just one example of how queer students are scared into the closet at a school that prides itself on being outside of it. When I first arrived at Swarthmore my freshman year, I put my name on the SQU mailing list because I wanted to find a place where I could share my thoughts about my sexuality with other intelligent, sensitive people who could relate to my experiences and contribute their own. I’ve found, after nearly three years on said mailing list, that SQU has failed to deliver, in a colossal way. Whether it’s a shortness of vision or too entrenched an image of what it means to be “the” queer group on campus, SQU does itself, the queer community, and the school at large a disservice by existing as it does.

So, no, to answer your question “youreuptight@swarthmore.edu,” I’m not going to remove myself from the SQU mailing list. But you (and presumably, the rest of the SQU Board) might want to consider it, if you’re failing to see what so many Swarthmore students have acknowledged: that your leadership, direction, and organization have failed us. For members of an institution that prides itself on being queer-friendly from the minute you get an acceptance packet in the mail, we deserve better.